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RUTH GOLDSTEINRuth Goldstein is an assistant professor of global and international studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her email is ruth.goldstein@uci.edu.

Why now? After so long, [do] you all want to know about the forest, about the plants as sentient, aware … We have always considered them to be family – the trees, ayahuasca, Brazil nuts, all of it! And now you want to talk about medicinal plants … What is this, another type of biopiracy? (Txai Tuwe, Huni Kuĩ)

Txai Tuwe (see Fig. 8), a young Huni Kuĩ healer, stands across from me in a maloka, a 12-pointed thatch-roofed structure with no walls. He has just enquired about my interest in medicinal plants, the rainforest and the sentience of botanical life. His concern is biopiracy: the stealing of biological materials and associated ethnobiological knowledge. It is April 2011 and we are meeting on the grounds of the Pro-Indian Commission1 in Brazil’s state of Acre, near the Peruvian and Bolivian borders. ‘Txai’ designates someone who is ‘more than friend, more than brother’2 – someone who recognizes the interconnected-ness of human and non-human life, who works selflessly to improve the lives of others (Carneiro da Cunha & de Almeida 2002). Malú Ochoa, my neighbour and soon-to-be housemate, has introduced us. As the executive director of the non-profit Pro-Indian Commission, Ochoa brings together indigenous leaders throughout Brazil and from across the tri-border region.

Txai Tuwe suggests that we find another place to talk. The maloka is usually reserved for important meetings during the day and ayahuasca ceremonies at night. We find a spot under a flowering jacaranda tree, with the nearby flowers of ‘monkey’s apricot’ perfuming the air (see Figs 1 & 2). The commission’s land is a rainforest oasis, sur-rounded by treeless cattle fields and a timber mill. Its very existence exemplifies Amazonian indigenous resistance, sitting at a literal crossroads of infrastructure develop-ment: just off the Transacreana Highway, several hundred metres before an intersection with the recently constructed Interoceanic Highway.3

Cross-border traffic of all sorts has increased with the paving of new roads throughout Amazonia. Occasionally, we hear the rumble of a logging truck. ‘Indigenous leaders are worried about the changes that new roads bring to this border zone’, Txai Tuwe says, referring to the Interoceanic Highway that connects Acre with Peruvian cities. Concerns range from violence instigated by drug and human traf-fickers entering indigenous villages to deforestation and marauding biopirates (see Fig. 3).

At the COP9 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Bonn, Germany, Txai Tuwe had served as one of the indigenous representatives for Amazonlink.org, a small Brazilian non-profit organization dedicated to pro-tecting indigenous rights. It ran workshops titled ‘Vigilant’ or ‘Watchful villages’, empowering communities with knowledge about their rights to share – or not share – information about their plant knowledge and medicinal practices (Fig. 5).

Txai Tuwe explained that when someone with ethno-botanical training like me arrives from some cosmopol-itan elsewhere and starts to ask questions about plants, his first instinct is to enquire why I want to know about Amazonian plants, their history and ethnomedicinal appli-cations. For indigenous communities whose medicinal plants and indigenous knowledge circulate in the global marketplace, biopiracy is simply a continuation of colo-nial plunder, as it operates for profit and fails to acknowl-edge indigenous knowledge, benefit sharing or informed consent (Danley 2012; Shiva 1997; Tustin 2006). Its close cousin, bioprospecting, formalizes intellectual property

rights, patenting commercial products developed from ethnobiological materials and knowledge – though often without substantive benefit sharing (Shiva 1997). ‘Prior informed consent’ has been on the United Nations’ books since 1991, but implementing it continues to pose chal-lenges. The discussion over how to do so continues. Amazonlink.org’s tactics went directly to the communi-ties. Governments are more likely to enforce policies that their constituents demand.

The year 2011 marked a crackdown on biopirates by the Brazilian government (Ellsworth 2010), in recognition that the greatest offenders tend to be pharmaceutical cor-porations (Indriunas 2003). Although the 2016 coup that gave Michel Temer control of Brazil and the 2018 elec-tion of right-wing Jair Bolsonaro have drastically changed Brazil’s political landscape, my interest continues to focus on how plants and indigenous intellectual property rights in Brazil become entwined with claims for political sover-eignty and territory (Danley 2012; Goldstein forthcoming; Pantoja 2008; Pantoja & Meyer 2014; Schmidlehner 2011; Tustin 2006). Indigenous methods of collection and knowledge about plants have often facilitated Western pharmaceutical development (Balick & Cox 1997; Duke 1992). Certainly, people can refuse to speak to researchers – biopirates or not – but economic vulnerability often trumps protective practices.

1. Comissão Pro-Indio (CPI).

2. ‘Mais do que amigo, mais do que irmão’.

3. The Transacreana Highway runs roughly 94 km across the state of Acre. The Interoceanic Highway stretches from Brazil’s Atlantic coast to Peru’s Pacific coast, some 5,000+ km.

Balick, M. & P. Cox 1997. Plants, people, and culture: The science of ethnobotany. New York: Scientific American Press.

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Carneiro da Cunha, M. & M.B. de Almeida 2002. Enciclopédia da floresta – O Alto Juruá: práticas e conhecimentos das populações. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.

Danley, V. 2012. Biopiracy in the Brazilian Amazon: Learning from international and comparative law successes and shortcomings to help promote biodiversity conversation in Brazil. Florida A & M Law Review 7(2): 291-327.

de la Cadena, M. 2010. Indigenous cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual reflections beyond ‘politics’. Cultural Anthropology 25(2): 334-370.

.— 2015. Ecologies of practice: Across Andean worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Domínguez-Clavé, E. et al. 2016. Ayahuasca: Pharmacology, neuroscience and therapeutic potential. Brain Research Bulletin 126(1): 89-101. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.brainresbull.2016.03.002.

Donald, D. 2012. Indigenous métissage: A decolonizing research sensibility. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 25(5): 533-555.

Ethnobotanies of refusalMethodologies in respecting plant(ed)-human resistance

Figs 1 & 2. ‘Monkey’s apricot’ (abricó-de-macacao) tree – fruits and flower.

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Duke, J.A. 1992. Handbook of biological active phytochemicals & their activity. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

Ellsworth, B. 2010. Brazil to step up crackdown on ‘biopiracy’ in 2011. Reuters, 22 December.

Farnsworth N. & D. Fabricant 2001. The value of plants used in traditional medicine for drug discovery. Environmental Health Perspectives 109(1): 69-75.

Fecteau, L.M. 2001. The ayahuasca patent revocation: Raising questions about current US patent policy. Boston College Third World Law Journal 21(1): 69-104.

Frood, A. 2015. Ayahuasca psychedelic tested for depression. Nature, 6 April. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature.2015.17252.

Goldstein, R. 2009. An ecology of the self and other wild thoughts. PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley.

— forthcoming. The philosopher plant and the scientist’s specimen. Ethnos.

Hall, M. 2011. Plants as persons: A philosophical botany. Albany: SUNY Press.

Haraway, D. 2007. When species meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hartigan Jr, J. 2017. How to interview a plant. In Care of the species: Races of corn and the science of plant biodiversity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hoover, E. 2017. The river is in us: Fighting toxics in a Mohawk community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Indriunas, L. 2003. Biopirataria: O Brasil se defende. Abril online. https://super.abril.com.br/cultura/biopirataria-o-brasil-se-defende/.

Kimmerer, R. 2013. Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.

Kirksey, E. & S. Helmreich 2010. The emergence of multispecies ethnography. Cultural Anthropology 25(4): 545-576.

Kopenawa, D. & B. Albert 2013. The falling sky: Notes from a Yanomami shaman (trans.) N. Elliott & A. Dundy. Cambridge: University of Harvard Press.

Kosek, J. 2010. Ecologies of empire: On the new uses of the honeybee. Cultural Anthropology 25(4): 650-678.

Labate, B.C. 2010. As religiões ayahuasqueiras, patrimônio cultural, Acre e fronteiras geográficas. Ponto Urbe 7. http://pontourbe.revues.org/1640 (accessed 20 May 2018).

This article began with Txai Tuwe’s initial provocation about whether my interest in plant sentience might repre-sent ‘another kind of biopiracy’. Building on scholarship that Natasha Myers has termed the ‘plant turn’ in Western anthropological and philosophical research, I see an oppor-tunity to highlight the legacy and continued contribution of indigenous knowledge to social theory, underlining how people both within and outside of a white North American and European tradition of critical thought have long prac-tised ‘becoming with and alongside plants’ (Myers 2015).

I consider the disciplinary as well as the political ramifi-cations of botanico-human relations when plant healers and practitioners – particularly indigenous ones – go largely uncited in these scholarly discussions. Incorporating the invaluable theoretical insights gained from analyzing the work of European and American plant scientists and scholars, I propose an ‘ethnobotanical turn’ that recognizes the pre-existing seeds of thought about plant sentience, long sown by indigenous ethnobotanical practitioners, healers and knowers around the world. This approach both acknowledges and engages with the political stakes rooted in botanical knowledge.

In Brazil, indigenous claims for territory and political sovereignty have gained traction when linked to cultural patrimony. Many Brazilian anthropologists directly engage in politico-legal debates (Carneiro da Cunha & de Almeida 2002; Labate 2010, 2012; Pantoja 2008). If the govern-ment considers a particular plant (or animal) and practice to be cultural patrimony and it lives in a specific area, the possibility of land rights becomes a reality. If biopirates snatch cultural patrimony, this can hurt indigenous efforts to demarcate land, which also connotes political power.

As Txai Tuwe continued to remind me in 2018, indig-enous communities – and not only his own – have long considered plants to be aware, communicating and part of the family. Indigenous scholars like Zoe Todd (2016), Elizabeth Hoover (2017), Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013), Enrique Salmón (2000), Rosalyn LaPier (2005, 2016) and Whyte (2013) to name a few, have eloquently written about concentric kinship ecologies among human and non-human life. Todd (2016) has also pointed to the institu-tional racism in the politics of academic citation.

Citing Métis scholar Dwayne Donald, Todd promotes ‘ethical relationality’: ‘Ethical relationality is an ecolog-ical understanding of human relationality that does not deny difference, but rather seeks to more deeply under-stand how our different histories and experiences position us in relation to each other’ (Donald 2012: 535). This form of relationality encourages ‘reciprocity of thought’ as part of a philosophical commitment for both Métis scholars. This is an approach to knowledge production that takes the ‘ecology’ of citation seriously and considers the kinds of collaborative analysis and existence that could flourish if indigenous thinkers were cited in scholarly conversations, particularly about non-human life and knowledge appro-priated from them.

Bringing ‘ethical relationality’ to plant-human centred research, I examine how a non-indigenous ethnobotanist-anthropologist like myself, trained in the Western tradition of single (species) authorship, might learn from indige-nous thinkers as well as plant (and mycorrhizal) ways of being-in-the-world (Goldstein 2009; Marder 2012; Myers 2015, 2016; Tsing 2015). The goal is to work towards more collaborative ethnobotanical and ethnographic methods. This may entail a refusal to disseminate the eth-nobotanical information shared with me and to cite with ethical relationality. When it comes to intellectual property rights, who ‘owns’ the ideas depends entirely on who has ‘thought’ or ‘authored’ them first. The acknowledgement of intellectual property rights for indigenous thinkers, aca-demic or not, impacts their cultural practices as well as

political and territorial rights – which is to say, their very existence.

Rooting ontological and ethnobotanical turnsWhen first speaking with Txai Tuwe, I recount Audra Simpson’s concerns ‘On ethnographic refusal: Indigeneity, “voice” and colonial citizenship’ (Simpson 2007). We imagine what it would be like for indigenous communities across the Americas to share experiences and strategies of resistance. Txai Tuwe wonders: ‘what ethnobotanist would refuse to report on the plants and the people?’ The extensive efforts required to detail the identifying markers and medicinal applications of Amazonian plants means that even if one doesn’t intend to contribute to biopiracy, it’s possible to operate as an unwitting accomplice. Yet refusing or confusing the foreign researcher is a long-prac-tised mode of resistance. Philosopher Michael Marder’s ‘Resist like a plant! On the vegetal life of political move-ments’ (2012) joins my analysis in this vein. His medi-tation on plant strategies and intellectual contributions to social movements illuminates possibilities for ethnobota-nies and methodologies of refusal in respecting plant(ed)-human resistance.

Marder is one of the European scholars (with a Brazilian grandmother) at the forefront of working through ques-tions about ‘plantbeing’ in the world through Western metaphysics (Marder 2012, 2013, 2014). Similarly, Natasha Myers, whose decolonial feminist approach to what she ‘half cheekily, half seriously’ wants to call the ‘Planthroposcene’ (Myers 2016, 2017a) enlarges the sociobotanical field of investigation. Charting a course for ‘a planthropology’ (Myers 2015), Myers insists on looking ‘for ways of knowing that can expose the colonial and extractive logics of the sciences, while holding scientists, their publics, governments, and industry accountable to asking better questions and cultivating more robust modes of inquiry’ (Myers 2017b).

For Myers, this is a way to respond to – and with – those hardest hit by climate change, supporting ‘the creation of knowledge forms that can help us to contest constrained regimes of evidence, unsettle ideas about what modes of attention, objects, methods and data forms are proper to the sciences, and disrupt assumptions about whose knowledge counts’ (ibid.). It is in this spirit that I write and examine the different forms of knowledge production, calibration and sharing that impact indigenous claims for political autochthony and territory.

It is not just in the social sciences and humanities where plants have re-entered the spotlight. Or perhaps, it is because there is an acknowledgement in other corridors of Western science that ‘the plant’, as an object of analysis, has again become fruitful. This raises something of a leafy finger against the foundational notions of Aristotle’s De anima, where plants lack sentience due to their lack of movement. The plant turn accompanies the ontological turn in anthropology and participates in multispecies scholarship (Haraway 2007; Kirksey & Helmreich 2010; Kosek 2010) across the social sciences. These flourishing waves of thought have the potential to acknowledge indig-enous notions of plant-personhood (Hall 2011; Kopenawa & Albert 2013; Viveiros de Castro 2004), building theo-retical and political solidarities across racial and ethnic differences.

The concern, however, is that the myriad theoretical turns within European and North American enquiry might contribute to an ongoing colonial practice of drawing from, but not acknowledging and citing, indigenous thinkers, in addition to promoting biopiracy. If indigenous voices are left out of the conversation, then there is little hope for a thorough reflection on the colonial paradigm – if one indeed seeks to replace it – in the social sciences as well

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(From left to right, above to below)Fig. 3. Brazilian-Peruvian border control of human trafficking and biological materials.Fig. 4. Tractor at dawn in the Brazilian Amazon on the Interoceanic Highway.Fig. 5. Trucks remove illegal timber.Fig. 6. Project Watchful Villages.Fig. 7. Ayahuasca.Fig. 8. Txai Tuwe at UN meeting in 2013: he attends international conferences to advocate for indigenous rights.

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— 2012. In Ayahuasca religions in Acre: Cultural heritage in the Brazilian borderlands. Anthropology of Consciousness 23(1): 87-102.

— & C.Clavner. 2014. ‘Foreword’. Ayahuasca shamanism in the Amazon and beyond. Oxford Online Scholarship.

— & I. Goldstein 2009. Ayahuasca: From dangerous drug to national heritage: An interview with Antonio A. Arantes. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 28: 53-64.

LaPier, R. 2005. Blackfeet botanist. Montana Naturalist 4-5.

— 2016. Smudging: Plants, purification and prayer. Montana Naturalist 16-17.

Marder, M. 2012. Resist like a plant! On the vegetal life of political movements. Peace Studies Journal 5(1): 24-32.

— 2013. Plant thinking: A philosophy of vegetal life. New York: Columbia University Press.

— 2014. The philosopher’s plant: An intellectual herbarium. New York: Columbia University Press.

McKenna, D. 2005. Ayahuasca and human destiny. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs (37)2: 231-234.

Myers, N. 2015. Conversations on plant sensing notes from the field. NatureCulture 35-36.

— 2016. Photosynthesis. Cultural Anthropology, 21 January. http://culanth.org/fieldsights/790-photosynthesis

— 2017a. From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing gardens for plant/people involution. History and Anthropology 1-5.

— 2017b. Ungrid-able ecologies: Decolonizing the ecological sensorium in a 10,000 year-old naturalcultural happening. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 3(2): 1-24.

Pantoja, M.C. 2008. Os Milton: Cem anos de história nos Seringais. Rio Branco, Brazil: Edufac.

— & M. Meyer 2014. Kuntanawa: Ayahuasca, ethnicity, and culture. In Labate & Clavner 2014.

Salmón, E. 2000. Kincentric ecology: Indigenous perceptions of the human-nature relationship. Traditional Ecological Knowledge 10(5): 1327-1332.

Sanabria, E. 2017. Healing encounters: Ayahuasca and the politics of knowledge. Paper given at the Psychedelic Science 2017 conference, Oakland, CA.

Schmidlehner, M.F. 2011. Biopirataria: Fim da vista? Revista Jurídica Consulex 31-33.

as in plant biology, intellectual property rights and drug-manufacturing. While Métis scholar Zoe Todd’s searing critique of the ontological turn, where ‘ontological is just another word for colonialism’ (Todd 2016), is duly noted, her focus is on Latour’s ‘Gaia’ lecture and not on the sus-tained engagement of Latin American anthropologists who take seriously Amerindian cosmologies and scholars (Blaser 2013; de la Cadena 2010, 2015; Viveiros de Castro 2004, 2014).

In the next section, I graft parts of the plant and onto-logical turns to fertilize an ethnobotanical turn within the framework of post-colonial studies, to offer possible modes of scholarly engagement and response-ability (Haraway 2007) in plant-centred anthropological analysis. John Hartigan’s ‘How to interview a plant’ (Hartigan 2017) and attention to other kinds of phytocommunica-tive strategies (Schulthies 2019) come to mind. I highlight ayahuasca as an example of how certain plants and people are involved in collaborative survival (Tsing 2015) while demonstrating the entwined semiotic-material stakes of the ethnobotanical turn and considering indigenous claims for traditional knowledge and territory.

Ayahuasca: A political, spiritual and psychedelic plantThe day that Txai Tuwe and I spoke under the jacaranda tree, he asked if I would be willing to take an ‘ethnog-raphy of refusal’ a step further: what about working to inform indigenous communities of their rights to refuse to share information? What about collaborations across the ‘informant-researcher divide’? I agreed. There are quite a few people and plants that I have chosen not to write about and I remain an active collaborator with the Pro-Indian Commission and its indigenous sister federation in Peru. Txai Tuwe’s position as a leader in his community and as a shaman fuels his advocacy for indigenous intellectual property rights on the local and global level, particularly when it comes to ayahuasca and land titles for indigenous communities.

Ayahuasca (see Fig. 7) has become a charismatic botan-ical for multiple disciplines. For the psychedelic sciences, it is the philosopher’s plant par excellence (Labate 2010; Labate & Clavner 2014; McKenna 2005; Sanabria 2017). For neurobiologists, ayahuasca – as the main ingredient in a sacred brew – has increasingly become an object of analysis for everything from addiction research (Talin & Sanabria 2017) to treating depression (Domínguez-Clavé et al. 2016; Frood 2015). For legal scholars, ayahuasca’s patent revocation represented a landmark case in intel-lectual property law (Fecteau 2001) that exemplified concerns over indigenous intellectual property rights (Danley 2012; Tustin 2006). For anthropologists, aya-huasca has long been a source of contemplation, if not also inebriation (Labate 2010; Pantoja 2008; Shepard & Yu 2004; Taussig 1980).

In Acre, ayahuasca has helped people to ‘re-collect’ their indigenous past. The brutal days of the rubber barons deracinated indigenous peoples from their families and their land (Pantoja 2008; Pantoja & Meyer 2014). Because of the efforts of Brazilian-based anthropologists like Pantoja, as well as Beatriz Labate and Llana Goldstein, to recognize ayahuasca as cultural patrimony (Labate & Goldstein 2009), claims of indigeneity made through aya-huasca now enable applications for land titles.

In April 2017, Labate organized a symposium on psy-chedelic science. Anthropologist Emilia Sanabria partici-pated. Her paper, ‘Healing encounters – Ayahuasca and the politics of knowledge’, caught my attention because her concerns echo those of indigenous leaders like Txai Tuwe. Speaking to a disciplinarily diverse audience, Sanabria suggested that anthropology has a particular skill set, one

which could contribute to a more collaborative and ethi-cally engaged research practice when it comes to plant-based medicine. The ontological turn was central to her talk. She explained how many scholars address the ‘reali-ties’ and aliveness of different life forms – plants, animals, atoms – and take ‘seriously the claims that people beyond the West are making regarding their engagements and rela-tionships [with non-humans] that Western science cannot otherwise see or measure or comprehend’ (Sanabria 2017). Sanabria pushed for ‘decolonizing’ the science in the psy-chedelic sciences.

Sanabria then posed a question: ‘What is a plant?’ The various answers demonstrated the division between Western scientific knowledge and ways of knowing that might be deemed indigenous or folkloric. Sanabria’s point was that if one takes ‘indigenous and traditional epistemologies seriously, what transpires is that plants can be sentient beings, they may have a spirit or impart wisdom … perhaps particular kinds of care might be extended to them; they may form part of kinship struc-tures’ (ibid.). Through the category of the plant and the entwined genealogies of human-plant relations, Sanabria pointed to the crossroads at which both anthropology and the psychedelic sciences currently sit. Anthropology shares its history with colonization. The psychedelic sci-ences, if its practitioners are not careful, would end up following a similar neocolonial trajectory, disregarding the existence of pre-existing indigenous healing practices and knowledge.

Why scholars constructing a discipline of psychedelic science would do well to consider other ontologies illu-minates the intellectual debates and political stakes within anthropology. Through the continued efforts to make anthropology a formalized and ‘real’ – not ‘soft’ – science in the United States, the discipline’s history is riddled with instances of trying to prove its ‘truth’ based on ‘social facts’. Sanabria pointed to this tension in the psychedelic sciences. The critique of the status quo of Western psychology and medicine notwithstanding, there is also the ‘delicate exer-cise of becoming legitimate, of building an evidence-based regime and validating within the hegemonic science, new – well, actually very old treatments’ (ibid.).

As Sanabria built her case for decolonization, she described how plant healers and psychonauts were inter-ested in understanding alternative social realities – like the anthropologists involved in the ontological turn. She urged her audience to consider how ‘this shift is anchored in a critical reflection on the colonial, the racist, the sexist characteristics of the paradigm it is replacing’. That is, to consider what one calls ‘new’ and for whom it is so. Within the colonial paradigm of intellectual property rights, the semiotics of citing or contesting novelty for indigenous individuals and communities materializes – or dematerial-izes – in land-based claims and political voice.

Sanabria’s argument strikes a chord with Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s declaration that ‘history does not begin with the formalization of the discipline, but with the emergence of the symbolic field that made this formalization possible’ (2003: 14). When Trouillot wrote ‘Anthropology and the ‘savage slot’’, he saw anthropology clinging to the ‘slot’ of the ‘good Indian’ to find new modes and models of enquiry, rather than within its own North American geographical and disciplinary borders (2003: 13). The hoped-for posi-tioning of the ontological turn is, as Sanabria says, a disci-plinary approach that takes seriously other people’s ways of being in the world, their origin stories, their cosmolo-gies. It changes the ‘thematic field’ in a way that Trouillot might find promising. The concern I have with any theo-retical ‘turn’ in anthropology is similar to Sanabria’s with respect to the psychedelic sciences. Reflecting on Todd’s (2016) work: if indigenous voices are left out of scholarly

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conversations, what space is there to reflect upon and shift the knowledge production paradigm away from an extrac-tion and erasure model?

Resowing scholarly engagement: Thinking and resisting like a plantIn his essay, ‘Resist like a plant! On the vegetal life of political movements’, Michael Marder asks: ‘What would it mean to occupy public space without appropriating it? To manifest a multiplicity of bodies in a locale without asserting a sovereign right over it? Would it not imply being in a place without laying claim to it, being there for others’ (Marder 2012: 29)? This is, Marder argues, some-thing that plants do. I would like to consider Marder’s questions, adopting his provocation on ‘photosynthesis’ to recognize that we humans are here because of the plant kingdom and ‘are not alone’ in the world (Myers 2016). In Marder’s version, there is a risk of a single-rooted story. Inhabiting but not appropriating space, honouring the interconnections of human with non-human life, has a precedent – something that (indigenous) people practised before European paddles struck their shores.

Pushing the questions about collaborative method-ologies and survival further: can we (non-Native North American and European scholars) do more than imagine non-appropriative (citational) space-holding and can we implement it? Can plants help us to think and act ‘outside of capitalist rhythms’ as Natasha Myers (2016) asks us to do? Yes, but one has to recognize how difficult it is for anyone who is economically vulnerable to step outside of global capitalism if we are to pursue a collaborative exist-ence with companion humans and non-humans alike.

This is where Zoe Todd’s (2016) invocation of Métis scholar Dwayne Donald’s (2012) ‘ethical relationality’, provides some seeds for future thoughtful action. While the (re)new(ed) interest in plant-human relations risks veering towards an appropriation without the citation of indigenous plant healers, it could also take advantage of the opportunity presented by the work of ethnobotanists and those working toward a ‘planthropology’ (Myers 2015) to resituate Western anthropological research within a broader ecology of ethnical relationality.

In looking for ‘reentry into the discourse on otherness’ (Trouillot 2003: 27) that considers the political ramifi-cations of citability in academia as well as with regards to biopiracy, I highlight the collaboration of Brazilian Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa with French anthro-pologist Bruce Albert (Kopenawa & Albert 2013). Kopenawa’s words recall Txai Tuwe’s beliefs about the forest as kin, along with some suspicion as to why white researchers are so focused on the trees. ‘The words of “ecology” are our ancient words … The xapiri [spirits] have defended the forest since it first came into being … Is it not still as alive as it has always been? The white people who once ignored all these things are now starting to hear them a little … to defend the forest’ (2013: 393). Kopenawa’s hope in telling his story to Albert is to keep the ‘forest alive’ as it has always been and to answer ‘those who ask themselves what the inhabitants of the forest think’ (ibid.: 11).

Kopenawa also responds to the rhetorical question that Txai Tuwe posed, about why Western researchers have res-urrected their botanical fascination. ‘Now they call them-selves “people of the ecology” because they are worried to see their land getting increasingly hot’ (ibid.: 393). So while there is also concern from Western ethnobotanists that the Amazonian ‘secrets of nature’ are disappearing and need to be known, catalogued and saved (in Western seed vaults), there is also the disciplinary drive to find new research subjects. Txai Tuwe expressed an understandable suspicion of North American and European anthropolo-

gists looking to the botanical kingdom for new projects. He has seen this lead to another wave of extractive knowl-edge production and export in Brazil. Sitting under the jac-aranda tree, he spoke about collaborations with Brazilian anthropologists that had enabled demarcations of land and political support. Yet he wondered about others, like me. Only after years of knowing one another has that suspicion lifted. I don’t think it should be any other way. That suspi-cion and refusal to share ideas and information is part of the anthropological baggage that comes from carrying on with the ‘savage slot’.

ConclusionAfter we first met, Txai Tuwe received a fellowship to study film and English at New York University. Now trav-elling back and forth to the United States from Acre, he is documenting the Huni Kuĩ’s evolving rituals and lan-guage preservation practices. He has also been recording the political marches and seated protests which have taken place since Michel Temer usurped power in Brazil. It remains unclear whether newly elected Jair Bolsonaro, supported by the previous military dictatorship, will allow any form of political opposition. With his platform as a healer, Txai Tuwe addresses North American audiences about the politics that surround biopiracy and plant-healing practices.

Since 2016, the right-wing Brazilian government has erased legislation that bestowed land rights and mapped political territory for Amazonian indigenous groups. In April 2018, multi-ethnic indigenous groups occupied space around the federal capital buildings in Brasilia to protest against the dissolution of their rights as Brazilian citizens. The government turned high-powered water hoses on them. Marder’s words are resonant here: ‘To resist like a plant is not to protest for the sake of ground to be gained; the program of a limited re-distribution of wealth from the richest one percent to the rest … is pointless if it leaves the principle of appropriation intact’ (2012: 29). The intention of the peaceful occupation was to say, ‘We are here. We are citizens’. Without (inter)national support, the protest withers, buried under the next newsworthy event.

Drawing on what European and North American sci-entists and scholars can learn from indigenous protests and plant ways of being-in-the-world, a fundamental step is to participate in a ‘decolonizing ecology’ that is about ‘being better allies for indigenous resurgence projects’ (Myers 2017b). Whether in academic writing or in bodily protest, this means ‘conspiring’ – that is, ‘breathing with’ – not just plants but also people, creating ‘alter-relations’ with one another that do not erase or ignore differences of one’s capacity to breathe, where the air inhaled is not necessarily of equal quality (Simmons 2017). An ‘ethno-botany of refusal’ forms a branch of the ethnobotanical turn, in an attempt to conspire in an agitation against ‘set-tler atmospherics’ (ibid.). It seeks to expose and uproot the principles of appropriation in biopiracy and anthropo-logical practices.

Addressing the ‘intactness’ of appropriation in the realm of anthropological enquiry, Audra Simpson writes: ‘Although more acceptable than in the past, anthropo-logical analyses of indigeneity may still occupy the “salvage” and “documentary” slot for analysis, an elabo-ration of object that results from the endurance of cat-egories that emerged in moments of colonial contact, many of which still reign supreme’ (Simpson 2007: 69). To unseat such enduring categories of analysis, multi-authored collaborations, cross-pollinations and ‘ethical relationality’ are necessary in anthropology. Ultimately, respecting myriad forms of plant(ed)-human resistance will come from a close listening and studied reciprocity in human-plant relations. l

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